Can you get sore muscles from watching movies? Of uncomfortable cinema chairs, certainly, but films? Anora, the new film by Red Rocket director Sean Baker, definitely comes close. As the credits rolled across the screen, I found myself exhausted and exhausted in a dark hall in Cannes, but I still walked out of the cinema with a big grin.
Anora gets your pulse racing like only The Black Diamond with Adam Sandler can, and screams, beats and dances into your heart until you can’t get rid of it anymore. I haven’t seen a better film in Cannes 2024 so far.
Tarantino star Mikey Madison chases money and a husband in Anora
For leading actress Mikey Madison, Anora will hopefully turn into the Hollywood springboard that she has earned since her appearances in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Better Things and Scream. Madison plays the erotic dancer Ani, who makes her way in a New York City club with a welcoming smile and patented service friendliness. Ani approaches her work professionally, always looking to increase her customers’ happiness and their pay.
When the Russian oligarch’s son Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) hires her as his girlfriend for a week, a new world opens up for Ani. The lovable Timothée Chalamet lookalike with a concentration deficit squanders his parents’ pocket money on parties, coke and trips to Vegas. Having fun, posting stories on IG, sleeping, having fun, etc. After the two spontaneously get married, their life of luxury threatens to come to an abrupt end. The parents want to have the marriage annulled.
Sony
Mikey Madison as Manson Girl in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Anora only plays within a few days and then within about 24 hours. Because Ivan runs away and it’s up to Ani, the Armenian fixer Toros (Karren Karagulian) and his two wonderfully overwhelmed helpers Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yuriy Borisov) to pick him up in the Big Apple. Toros has to fulfill the parents’ order, Ani wants to prevent that at all costs. Together they form a bizarre quartet that insults each other but is forced to work together.
Anora presents us with a quartet to fall in love with
Sean Baker, who also wrote the screenplay, skilfully plays with expectations, incorporates some running gags into his funniest film to date and benefits from the chemistry of his cast. The petite Ani knows how to defend herself and doesn’t stop at cupboards on two legs.
This is how Anora begins as euphoric speedrun of the lives of the super rich and transitions into a turbulent and amusing journey through the night. Meanwhile, we learn to love Toros, Igor and Garnick, who didn’t expect the incredibly strong-willed bundle of energy at their side.
The three men try to make their way in the land of unlimited possibilities in their own way. Just like Ani, they are paid to please people. Their work costs them broken noses and frayed nerves. Almost all relationships in Anora are part of a transaction. The longer the roller coaster ride with the likeable quartet lasts, the faster the hope grows that someone will change that.
Anora has not yet been released in German cinemas.